In daylight the 5DII outside were fine.. With the 5DIII near every AF point is the center on the 5DII

Timbukto wrote:

Ever since the 6D came out, the 5DMKII's AF performance has gotten worse it appears. Although Focal Reikan statistics show it only slightly trails the 5DMKIII in accuracy and variance, and that most reports put the 6D as closer to the 5DMKII's performance instead of 5DMKIII (for which the gap although apparent, doesn't give a whole lot of room for the 6D to squeeze in). Most people continue to say that although the 5DMKII has a joystick, it is pretty pointless because the outer points are pointless.

I decided to test my joystick + outer points on a cloudy day with my trusty 85mm 1.8. 5DMKII is recently manufactured along with 85mm 1.8 with no MFA. Resized and minimally PP'd shots (even though resized you should be able to observe DOF range and fall off), I'll leave it to you to figure out focus point but in most cases they are the left most or right most points (quite frankly the other points are so close I just recompose from center). Most shots are throwaway shots, I was shooting to get more experienced and comfortable with the outer points AF.

Started with f2.8

Goose head in front of light background

Goose in front of dark background

Small target area, not incredibly detailed or contrasty

Opening up to 1.8 now to make margin of error more visible

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Diagonal outer point works too

As he moves I can jog my joystick and move the AF point to another outer AF point and not miss?

3 sequence tracking from right outer point, ending up to center

AF behaves according to my will, tracked right rooster, release shutter just before becoming obscure

This is an AF miss, hands and toy are in sharper focus, eyes are barely in focus near DOF fall off

I was not tossing away half of my shots. If anything more like 1/10 and that is not purely AF error but obviously user error. In the misfocused shot above all 3 of the same type of shots were misfocused similarly...I've learned that it is *consistent* in picking the wrong focus at times just as it can be consistent in picking the spot on focus. Something is throwing it off in the above instance, which is why I want to figure out as much as I can on how to improve AF chances...in the above example I am 100% certain a focus on the sweater would have done better than the eyes.